The Emmy-winning screenwriter reflects on his time at Cheers, pilots he'd love to make, and how to get ideas on the page for years on end

Rob Long broke into the entertainment business in 1990 by landing a
job as a staff writer on the hit TV show Cheers. He has since worked as
an Emmy award winning screenwriter, a producer, a script consultant, and
a commentator. Among other things, he is as a contributing editor at
National Review, delivers a syndicated weekly radio commentary called
Martini Shot and is Editor-in-Chief at Ricochet. Our interview took
place at his house in Venice, California, where he lives with his dog.

Give me the quick version of your career. How did it all happen?

How all this excitement? After college, I had no idea what to do. It was
1987, and the rule back then was that you go to Wall Street. I figured
there was one bank that would have me, but even they reminded me that
you have to know something about finance. Then an acquaintance got a job
teaching screenwriting at UCLA, and said, 'You should go to film
school.' I said, 'Okay.' At that point, nobody knew what that meant. So,
I came out to UCLA, and did their screenwriting program for about year
and a half. At a certain point, I had enough scripts written that I
signed with an agent, who got me work in four weeks.

You got a writing job that fast?

The business back then was different. They needed people, and it was
also this kind of weird, arcane skill, so if you could figure it out and
arrive at the right place at the right time, they just sucked you right
in. It was really like old Hollywood, like being at the luncheonette
counter and being discovered.

Was writing something you'd always done?

I always thought I was going to be a writer, but I don't think I really
knew what that meant. I'm still not sure. The kind of writing I do is
mostly such that I don't even write. I just talk things out. Someone
else writes it down. For dialogue and drama, I find that when I'm
staring at the screen or a blank page it isn't as easy as when I'm just
sort of thinking out loud. Prose is a really fun thing to do, but it's
harder. You have to write on every line. I don't really write for the
page, I try to write as if someone is speaking it.

Has that always been your method?

At my first job as a staff writer on Cheers, I walked into the number
one show in the country. People were getting Emmys and other awards, and
it was universally recognized as 'well-written.' But the truth was that
we weren't writing. None of us was sitting with a cardigan sweater and a
pipe typing it out. We were acting it out. We were in a room filled
with writers and a writer's assistant who took fantastic, fast
stenography, and we'd act it out for our colleagues. 'Sam comes in and
says this, then Norm does this.' If they laughed it went in, and if they
didn't laugh, it didn't go in.

In the old days, it was 9 to 12, but everybody knew the rules. It was
like a knightly code - certain things you would never do. I hate
sounding like an old man, but now it's broken down: the whole etiquette
of the room and how the room works. Sometimes I go in the room to help
out and it'll be a total cacophony.

So what are the rules?

For example, you can't get up, go to the bathroom, come back, and ask,
'Hey, what did you guys do when I was gone?' No, no, no. If you leave,
you leave. It marches forward. Another rule is that you can't be a
downer. In that moment when everyone is laughing at something, don't be
the guy who says, 'Wait a minute, do we really want to do it that way?'
Those people kill the spontaneity of the script.

Why is spontaneity important?

That's what delights the audience, right? You're trying to convince
people when they watch something that it is happening right then and you
try to capture that - the fun of something immediate. If you're doing
TV comedy, all you've got is a bunch of people in a room. They're all
living together or belong to the same family or they all work in the
same place - and so you've got to have a little bit of spark. It's hard
to do, but it's totally worth it. And if it sounds like it's already
been through this drama machine, it has a leaden quality. Some people
don't mind that - some people kind of like it. There are very successful
shows like that. But I like it a little more spontaneous.

What shows do spontaneity well?

There aren't very many. Very few people in the industry like doing it
because it's hard. Some of these single camera shows like The Office
pull it off sometimes - and 30 Rock does it, where you kind of don't
know from minute to minute what's going to happen. You have to be like
Tina Fey, who has how many years of emotional memory spent trying to
entertain a live audience and make them laugh. If they didn't laugh on
SNL, she bombs on national television. So she's got that working for
her.

But network executives hate spontaneity and straightforward humor.
They're never satisfied with something funny, because in order to
succeed it has to actually get laughs, which is always kind of a crap
shoot. They'd prefer for a plot that makes total sense, because it's
safer - even if you don't laugh, it doesn't fail completely, because
you've got this heavy-handed narrative carrying it along.

What's a successful show that isn't spontaneous?

Frasier was one. It was tightly written, and never had that party
atmosphere. But right now, I can't think of a successful show of that
kind - there aren't that many successful shows in general, and even
fewer successful comedies. When you take the audience out of it and
you're making a little movie every week, you have to be super good, you
have to be executing at an incredibly high level.

Tell me about the collaborative aspect of screenwriting. You're
trying to be creative, to think of good jokes, good scenes, good
dialogue. Are there specific people with whom you had a good dynamic?
You knew the way that they thought, or they knew the way you thought and
they would be the ones who, for some reason, would bring good material
out of you?

You want to work together with everybody. The best room I was ever in
was the Cheers room, which was like - we had incredibly high powered
people who all knew the rules and who all knew that the goal was to get
home. The show itself had a voice and so everybody was trying to say
something right for the show, true to the show, and you had a lot of
characters to work with. Usually a scene would have three characters,
but the setting is a bar, so you could easily bring in a fourth voice or
have a fifth character crossing in the background. So, you had all the
people working on different possibilities, and the rule was just always
keep building. You didn't have to have the punch line, you could just
have the setup. Or you could find yourself spending an hour on one joke,
and then someone would say, 'Change the setup like so,' and then you
do, and somehow it works.

What happens in a bad room?

There's a lot of chin stroking. Giving notes is the easiest thing in the
world. There's a whole generation of dumb ass kids who grew up
convinced that they're creative in some way. 'I'm really creative or I'm
really funny because I was in an improv troupe in college for a
semester, and even though nobody ever laughed at me I'm pretty creative,
and so I'm going to be a creative executive.' Which means, I don't have
to do anything ever. I don't have to actually write anything. I don't
have to actually create anything. I don't have to do anything. I could
just sort of stand there and say, 'Yeah, this scene's a little - um, I
don't know.' Just making these creative judgments. Everybody wants that
job - to be a consultant in life. Nobody wants to be the person doing
it.

Is that chin-stroking attitude damaging because it causes the writers
to get off track? Or is the problem that it's impossible to be creative
in an environment where putting yourself out there triggers criticism?

It takes away from that willingness to jump into the fire, but also I
think it's damaging because it elevates the easiest job in the world.
It's the difference between identifying a problem that you have four or
five funny solutions for - being willing to sit there and solve them,
and you believe that your job is to solve them - as opposed to what it
is now, where people think their job is to sort of identify problems,
talk for awhile and then find some non-funny, uninteresting way in prose
or dialogue to elide them.

They're making fixes to the logic of the plot. So at no point is anybody
saying, 'This seems not funny, let's go punch it up. I've got seven
jokes here I think it could be funny,' because that requires you to have
talent. People always try to negotiate themselves out of the job that
requires them to have talent. They're the first generation to grow up
with scoreless soccer and bicycle helmets. Insofar as they're concerned,
everybody's job is to kind of make them feel good.

What was it like going from a writer's room at a show like Cheers to sitting down at a screen alone to write things?

It was really hard. I still don't really do it. If I have to write a
comedy, I back into it. I'll write some notes for myself, then I'll
bring a writer's assistant. I'll walk around and I'll just talk and come
up with stuff. You end up with 30 pages of notes. I'll go through them
and try to put them in order and get other ideas. Then I'll bring the
writer's assistant back, and we go through the whole document again,
putting stuff in order. I'll just keep doing that and refining it each
time. Maybe by the third time I'll say, 'Okay, let's do it in screenplay
form,' but it'll actually end up half script, half prose. Before
actually sitting down to write something, I've got to have this great
big document that's already a bit like a script.

I can't, for some reason, face the blank screen.

Is the writer's assistant giving creative help? Or is it just a
matter of having someone that gets you out of transcribing your own
brainstorming sessions?

'I don't have to worry about transcribing this later myself' is actually
a big deal for me. Half of the stuff that I don't do, I don't do
because it's hard physically and I'm lazy. 'So I have to sit down and
type up this long recording of myself talking? I can't do that.' Having
someone else to do the writing frees me up to just think. It doesn't
matter if 2/3 of what I say doesn't go anywhere. I don't care. I'm not
typing it.

You're also getting feedback. There you are, acting out a scene, and the
writer's assistant is laughing. So it's like, 'Oh, it's good, okay.
That worked, put that in. That was good, it was funny.' At the same
time, it's important to make sure that you've got stuff coming out that
you're not pre-judging.

You can judge it all later.

Do you ever get writer's block?

A couple of years ago, I was just completely stymied from starting
something. I had this thing to do and I just didn't do it, and I
couldn't believe that I wasn't doing it. I called a friend of mine who's
a shrink back in New York, and I said, 'Do I have ADD? Is that what I
have?' She said, 'You should go see this guy I know, he's a shrink here
in L.A. I'll call him for you, he has a lot of writer clients.'

So I went to see this guy. He's a psychoanalyst, which is not so great. I
sort of laid out - I said, 'I think have I have ADD, so I think you
need to prescribe Ritalin or something,' and he said, 'You don't have
ADD or ADHD or whatever it is. I could prescribe it if you want, because
it won't hurt you, it'll just make you jumpy. But you don't have it.'
I'm like, 'What do I have?' And he says, 'I don't know.' We went back
and forth for another hour going through all the other things that it
could be. He says, 'Depression?' I was like, 'I don't think I am.' He
said, 'I don't think you are either.'

'Could it be,' said this doctor, 'that you just don't like writing comedy by yourself?' I said, 'I don't.'

'So why are you doing it?'

"It's because I have to," I said.

'Why?'

We went through the whole thing. I told him how we used to do it on
television shows. 'Well, why don't you just get a writer's assistant in
the room?' he said.

So I did.

Do you find that you work better when you're a little bit distracted?
At a coffee shop, for example, rather than a quiet room? Does the
setting matter?

If you wake up, get a cup of coffee, and sit down at your desk, say it's
9:30 in the morning. In that situation, I'm thinking to myself, 'Holy
shit, really? I'm going to be here all day doing this? This is painful
hard work! I can't do that. Please, what's on the web? Do I have any new
emails?' I just see myself as trapped, like I'm drowning, and I just
flail for anything to take away that awful feeling.

'My God,' I think, 'I could be here at this desk forever.'

And I can't. I just can't.

How do you get around it?

There's a technique which I think is really interesting - this Italian
software guy came up with it. He calls it the Pomodoro Technique. His
problem was that he was ADHD, he couldn't focus, he always had code to
write, and so he thought: 'I'm just going to set a timer to what I
believe is the minimum attention span unit,' which was 25 minutes. So he
sets his little timer for 25 minutes and he would just work straight
through. Every time he found himself distracted, he would just write
down what distracted him and then keep working. After 25 minutes - what
he calls a Pomodoro - you take an enforced five minute break, and then
you come back and do another 25 minutes.

And after three or four 25 minute sessions, you have to take a full 25
minutes off. He's Italian - he says this is time for a one espresso, one
cigarette, and then you come back. And when I am diligent about that,
it's fantastic. No matter how taxing a task is, 25 minutes of it is
bearable. I tell myself, 'I'm going to sit here and be creative and
write even if it's bad, I'm just going to write something for 25
minutes.'

'Okay?' I say. '25 minuets is not going to kill you, right?'

Are there any other methods that you've come across over that years? Even ones that have failed?

Everything fails eventually, right? You outsmart it. There was a guy
across the street from me who was a writer - I forgot his name. But he
sold a couple of big, big features. I think he's a big deal now. When
his little cottage across the street was being rented, I went and looked
at it because I thought, 'Maybe I should rent a little office.' And so I
went across the street and looked at it, and it was too big for what I
needed, but he had a little index card still taped above where his desk
used to be. So I went and looked at the index card. It's hilarious. It
said, '9 AM: START! 10:05: check email. 10:10: do stretches, pull ups,
10:30: START!' And he had a whole day listed of how he was going to
focus. It was impressive - a little index card with angry little
letters. I could never do that, but I could see wanting to. Nobody's
more hip to my bullshit than me.

How deliberate is the setup of your office? Is your desk intentionally near that window over there?

I write better by windows. Anything to remind me that I'm not trapped,
because being trapped is the worst. I find I'm most productive - I'm
going to San Francisco tomorrow, and I'm just booking my tickets. And
I'm thinking, I
probably should book that latest flight, because even if I get to the
airport at 8:00 AM, I could sit at the United Red Carpet club in SFO, and
it's really a productive place to work. I'm thinking the wait would be a
good thing. I get two full hours in there. I can catch up on stuff and
be way ahead. I know I can do stuff there productively because I'm not
there forever, right? I'm only there for two hours, there's a
comfortable chair, it's got Wi-Fi. I can do all the stuff I need to do,
because I know that pretty soon I'm going to fly away.

You see, escape is the important thing.

Do you have a favorite idea that you've come up with over the years? Or one that you're particularly engaged by right now?

One story I've been thinking about, and that might make good TV, is
about a guy who goes to visit his aging father on his birthday. He hated
his dad, had a terrible relationship with him. His father was a big
mogul somewhere and they just never got along, but he goes back for the
birthday, just because, you know, why not. His dad has a massive stoke
in the middle of the party and is basically on life support. So
everybody in the family ends up standing around this machine, and they
have to decide what to do. His ex-wife says, "Pull the plug." His new
wife, she doesn't quite know how the estate has been worked out, so she
says, "Wait a minute." The kids have their own issues. Everybody has an
interest in keeping this sort of brain dead old man alive. And that
sounded really interesting and funny in that mean, dark way that
everything funny is.

What about a project you'd love to do, but haven't been able to pull
off? Maybe it isn't commercially viable, or the networks just don't see
its appeal?

I've got a fantastic story that is going to be very difficult to
convince anyone to make. There are three brothers in South Carolina and
they have competing barbecue chains. The oldest brother makes the best
barbecue, famously good. But he is a crackpot confederate racist. He
flies this giant confederate flag in front of every one of his stores.
If you walk into one of them, you don't go right to the counter, you
have to walk through a small vestibule/bookshop where he sells racist
tracks and horrible, hand printed pamphlets, unbelievable stuff. But
he's got the best barbecue.

Well, I read about how this one store is being boycotted by every local
black church. But unfortunately, it's got the best barbecue, so a lot of
people buy it from the takeout window in the back. So you have this
fantastic irony: African-Americans in South Carolina going to the back
of the store, not due to Jim Crow regulations, but out of the shame and
embarrassment. No one wants to be seen walking in the door in this
place. But the barbecue is so good that everybody has got to have it. So
they all sneak around to the back so that none of their neighbors will
ever know.

To me, that would be a great show. And people will say, "Hey, this is great. But we can never put this on television."

But you still have the impetus to write it?

Oh well, you have to write it. And you never know. Maybe someone makes
it. I have to write it because if I don't I'll just kill myself, but
also because if you want to sell it, no one will buy it from the pitch.
They would just say, "Oh God, it's fascinating. No way." And I wouldn't
blame them. How do you execute a crack pot racist in a way that isn't
offensive, or on the other hand, too judgmental. It's just hard.

Right. It can't be too offensive or unrealistically unoffensive.

Yeah. You can't be so offensive that you think, "This is awful to
watch," but also you can't write this guy so that he gets his
comeuppance, right? And it's really something to pull it off. It's so
hard. It's super hard.

Like pulling off Archie Bunker.

Yeah, yeah, you're right, which of course they can never do now.

That's the great tragedy of American culture: that you could not do All in the Family
now. They would not let you. Americans have decided that the worst
thing in the world is to be offended, and so they're constantly running
around being offended. And there's no cultural elite to say, "Get over
it."

What role does that play in your writing? You always hear about
artists pushing back against taboos. Do your attitudes about the culture
of taking offense shape the projects that you want to write?

Oh yeah, for me definitely. I always feel like the struggle with radio
commentary is just being so truthful every week. Truthful enough that
your audience says, 'Oh, I get it. That's exactly right.' You want them
to say, 'Oh, that's exactly true. That happens all the time.' And
reality isn't always politically correct.

I did a script last year which I really liked. It's all set in an
office, where a bunch of people are getting laid off, some are getting
promoted, and there's a scene where these two women who are vice
presidents are having lunch. One of them is obsessing over the fact that
another women who hates her - all the women in the office hate one
another, but his one hates her especially - is her new boss. And so her
job is over. She's going to be fired and she's upset by that because she
loves her job. She loves her routine, she loves getting dressed in the
morning, she loves her outfits, she loves her briefcase, she loves the
laptop, she loves when they have conference calls, she loves going on
business, she loves all the things, she just loves it.

But now that it might end? She admits she doesn't always know what's
going on. She loves her job, but she has insecurities about it too.

So I turn this in, it goes to the studio, and I get this note back from a
female vice president who said, 'I love it, especially when she says
all women hate each other in the workplace, because they do.'

She said, 'Oh, I think that's going to be great. People love that
because it's true. But what about the part where she says she's not good
at her job?'

'I don't know, what do you mean?' I reply. 'She didn't say that.'

'She says that she doesn't always know what's going on.'

'Yeah, but isn't that true of everybody? Does everybody feel like they
don't always know what's going on?' This female vice president in a big
studio says to me, 'The character is a female vice president in a big
company. I just think that if you're a vice president at a big company,
you're obviously good at what you do. Is there some way we can make it
clear to everyone in the audience that she's really good at her job?'

Luckily, this was on a big conference call. There was a pause. If we'd
all been in one room, it would have been insane. Everybody would go
like, 'Are you kidding me? How much could you project?' Luckily, we
weren't looking at each other, so I said, 'We can take a look at that,
absolutely.' Then of course, the minute the call was over we called each
other and said, 'Can you believe that?'

If you just try to write what you think is true people don't always like that.

Is it fair to say that all good screenwriting rings true? I think about The Wire.
I've never been to Baltimore, or spent time in a police department, or
hung out with guys in a drug gang, but the scenes, the characters, the
dialogue - it's evident that the writers know what the hell they're
doing.

As you're working on a script, how do you know you have that verisimilitude?

I don't know. I was just helping out in a rewrite for a pilot. And it's a
really standard, straight down the middle family comedy. The story
revolves around a father and mother who are a little bit competitive
about child-rearing. It revolves around the daughter leaving the house,
and she texts her mom to say she's going to the library. But she doesn't
say anything to her dad. And it just seemed like it lacked something in
the ending. Well, one guy pitched a small bit of dialogue at the end.
The father says to the daughter, "Hey, you leave the house, you've got
to text both of us."

Small little thing. And it just sounded right to me.

I'm not married. I don't have kids. But it sounded like this very
believable, legitimate demand, and it gets across that he felt left out,
and what he wants to change. You have him say something really
specific, because you can believe anything from a character if it's
specific enough.

But how do you know that you've succeeded given that TV is a medium where the ultimate audience is watching at home?

For most of the kind of television comedy I write, I am with the
audience. The audience is there during tapings. There are 300 of them.
They've been corralled from malls and Universal Studios and all over
town, they come in and they're usually hot and they've been staying out
in the sun for a while and they come to this cold sound stage and they
start grumbling really within 45 minutes.

Your goal is to make them laugh, not just once but several times at the
same joke because you're going to shoot two or three takes. To me, the
studio audience is really important. In sort of the same way that maybe a
chef peeks into the dining room and watches as people sit there eating.

You went to cooking school, right?

Yes. I went in Paris and I went up in northern California.

Compare the creative process you use in cooking to what you do in your day job. Is it the same? Is it different?

It's not completely different - you're working on deadlines. You can
cook a great dinner, but if it isn't done until the next day at 10AM
it's not a great dinner. I work backwards too. For me, in a restaurant
you just want the plate to look good. You want people to have a good
looking plate of food, so you've got to move backwards from that vision,
making sure that it's going to have all the colors that you want,
something crunchy and something that's acidic and something that's fatty
and all that stuff. So maybe in that sense it is the same. You're
composing something backwards. You don't quite know what all those
things are going to be. But you know you need the protein and you know
you need the starch and you know you need some kind of green.

So you pull it all together.

It's my intention to conclude these interviews with hard won advice.
What would your answer be if someone came to you and said, 'I'm a young
aspiring screenwriter. What pitfalls are to be avoided? What should I do
to succeed?'

First I'd say that the job of your boss or your colleagues is not to
make you happy or to teach you anything. I think it takes young people a
long time to realize that. They still see their career as a kind of
long graduate course in life, which it isn't. I'd advice them to take
risks too. A lot of times people are totally risk averse when they're
young, which is bizarre. It used to be that you had to do 10 or 15
things, or one very big thing, before you'd get your own show. Now
they'll give it to you, but they'll take it away from you. They'll do
your pilot and then they'll fire you, which is unfair in many ways
because running a TV show is really a hard thing. It's not intuitive,
you have to learn it.

I'd also say that I never think about the commercial possibilities of a
script before I write it. I'd rather write it and like it, and then
figure out what happens later, because the thing is, there are two ways
to sell something. One is to pitch it, and then they pay you to write
it. And the other is to just write it and they pay you if they like it.

The latter is the spec version. Financially speaking, it is high risk.
Maybe you spend a lot of time writing something that you can't sell. But
if you write it well it has no real downside, because having a good
piece of material out there with your name on it is a great thing. There
are a lot of people who would read the script and say, "We'll never
make this, but I want to meet you." And that often means they want
something else from you later, or maybe they want to meet you and say,
'Is there any way you could do this, but not have the old man who runs
the barbecue place be a racist?'

And you can tell them, 'No, obviously that's the whole story,' but it
starts things going. Kicks off a working relationship. And it saves you
from having to say in the middle of the writing process, "I will execute
this in a way that won't make people crazy." You've done it, that's how
you're executing it. So, I would say, I would never think a lot about
commercial viability. Obviously, it has to be television show or a film
so certain things are just naturally ingrained in the medium, but don't
obsess about it.

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.